‘We are more’

by Patrick L. Kennedy

Q&A with Sr. Helen Prejean

Prejean with students in the Robsham lobby. Photograph: Caitlin Cunningham

About 250 students, faculty, and alumni filed into Robsham Theater on October 9 for a special screening of Dead Man Walking, the harrowing 1995 film about a brutal double murderer on death row and the nun who ministers to him and to the grieving.

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A long silence followed the closing credits as the nun herself took the stage. Not the Hollywood actress (Susan Sarandon) who portrayed her, but the real Helen Prejean of the order of St. Joseph of Medaille, 75, bespectacled, her hair cropped short and practical. “Can we get the house lights back on?” she asked in her Louisiana drawl. After a further pause in which the lights stayed off, the nun intoned, “Speak to me from the darkness.”

The audience laughed, and the lights did come back on, but the darkness of the film seemed to linger, and for a time nobody ventured forth to kick off the Q&A portion of the evening, which was co-sponsored by Boston College’s Church in the 21st Century Center, School of Theology and Ministry, and Center for Human Rights and International Justice. Eventually, students began trooping up to two microphones.

First question, from a young man in a backwards baseball cap: “How were you able to feel compassion [for a murderer]?”

Prejean (“pray-JAWN”) allowed that her initial reaction to murder is always outrage. However, she said, “Human beings are more than the worst act in their lives. You cannot be freeze-framed into your worst act.” It is her duty, said Prejean, who has counseled death row prisoners one-on-one for more than 30 years, to get the convict to take part in his redemption.

Then a young woman: “Watching an execution, what are you praying?”

“I believe Christ is always going to be with the victims, and at that point [the condemned man] is one, and I pray for his safe passage over into the arms of God,” Prejean answered. “I pray at the same time for the victims he killed. And for the family members that have been offered this—’Now you get to watch, and this is going to heal you’—when I know full well they’re going to go home and the chair is still going to be empty where their loved one sat. I’m praying for the warden, praying for the guards.”

Another young woman: “How do you convey to these prisoners that you do not condone their actions even though you do love them?”

“When they’re having trouble getting [to contrition],” Prejean began, “it’s ‘You did a terrible thing! You killed an innocent person. How do you think the parents feel? How would you feel if someone killed your mama?’ . . . It can be hard [for a prisoner] to feel compassion,” she said, with his own death looming.

Young man: “How do you cope with the trauma of the victim . . . and then the trauma of watching the death penalty?”

“Well, my life isn’t just trauma,” Prejean assured him. “I belong to a really good sisterhood of love and support, and a loving family, and I work with lawyers who are in there standing up for people. . . . I take time to pray, to meditate. I feed off the Scriptures. . . . [I] try to keep learning and be faithful to what I know.”

“Last question,” Prejean announced about an hour after she’d begun. “No pressure, but it better be profound.”

The audience laughed. A young man with a slight Mediterranean accent began to speak.

“After the movie, I remembered reading a speech Robert F. Kennedy made the day after Martin Luther King was killed,” he said. Reading now from his phone, the student recited a few lines:

“‘What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots. . . . This short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.'”

As the crowd filed out, one student confided to his friend, “It was good to have the Q&A afterward, because when that movie ended, I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to function after this.'”